A Hasidic Boy Is Butchered In Brooklyn
A Hasidic Boy Is Butchered In Brooklyn…
It was a routine walk from school, in supposedly familiar, safe territory, yet an eight-year-old boy was murdered in the most gruesome of way… hacked like something out of Jack-The-Ripper's London back alley. This depravity did not happen in the so called bad part of Brooklyn – but it took place in one of the safest enclaves in Brooklyn, New York. I do not normally write about this type of issue, but, perhaps, because I have a child in that age range… it registered, and moreover, it is the Christian in me. I am not going to get into the mindset of those responsible for the murder of the child, but I am reminded that evil is everywhere and that we must not point our fingers and engage in stereotypes, saying who is capable… engaging in rank speculation about the human psyche/heart.
The world is such and always has been replete with evil – it was Jeremiah, the Jewish Prophet of Old, who opined that the heart is desperately wicked – who can know it. The mostly Jewish enclave where the child met his gruesome demise would not register on the map, as a place where crime is rampant, much less crimes of this ogre nature. I am reminded of something that happened to me over a decade ago: one of my law professors, knowing that I lived in New York, said to me that if he were to leave a baby out on the side walk - in New York - he would meet bones on his return for the baby – the professor was intimating how prone to theft we were here in New York.
I, with my big mouth, responded to the professor in kind… telling him that where he lived in White-Picket-Fence Ohio… that they cheated on their taxes, beat their wives, and molested their children, of course in secret. Needles to say, I flunked the professor’s tax class. I conveyed that story to show that we have tendencies, even I, to stereotype. The Christ reminded us that many of us are like ‘white sepulchers’ and that we do not know where evil lurks; the truth is… evil is everywhere and my Jewish brothers and sisters, including the rest of us, will be a little bit more circumspect… refusing to place the usual credence in our ever increasingly lying eyes.
I must end with a parable from the Christ… whereby He and His disciples must have been privy to the tragedy of a building collapse, which killed dozens. The Messiah asked His disciples the rhetorical question that if they thought that those who survived the building collapse or those who did not suffer from the tragedy… were more ‘righteous’ than those who died. The Messiah's parable-like query of his disciples dove-tails into the Brooklyn boy’s murder because no neighborhood – no matter how upscale – is immune from tragedies, including unadulterated evil… our thoughts and prayers to the family of that boy.
